Artisans of the body in early modern Italy

In Baroque Europe, new fashions, the expansion of court life and the emergence of a genteel style of living called for new services for the body. This groundbreaking study explores the role of those involved in various aspects of the care, comfort and appearance of the body in seventeenth and early eighteenth century Italy, bringing to light the strong cultural affinities and social ties between barber-surgeons and the apparently unconnected trades of jeweller, tailor, wigmaker and upholsterer.

Drawing on contemporary understandings of the body, the author shows that shared concerns about health and well-being permeated the professional cultures of these medical and non-medical occupations. At the same time the detailed analysis of the life-course, career patterns and family experience of ‘artisans of the body’ offers unprecedented insight into the world of the urban ‘middling sorts’.

Adopting a biographical perspective seldom employed in studies of ordinary people, the book reveals the limits of paternal authority and the significance of horizontal and lateral kinship ties in artisanal families; it highlights the key role of women and neighbours, and of the master-pupil relationship in artisans’ lives, and gives special attention to the experience of bachelors, identifying patterns of masculinity specific to Southern-European, Catholic milieus.

The book represents essential reading for scholars and students of gender and of family and urban history in the early modern age, and is of great relevance to historians of the body and of the medical professions.

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Contents:-

List of plates
List of captions
List of figures
List of tables
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Introduction   
1. The view of the body of an ordinary surgeon 
2. Health, beauty and hygiene: the broad domain of a barber-surgeon’s duties  
3. Barber-surgeons and artisans of the body    
4. The place in society of artisans of the body  
5. Social and kinship ties     
6. Age, working relationships and the marketplace  
7. Women in the body crafts  
8. The weak father      
9. Respectable men   
10. The good surgeon     
Conclusion        
Bibliography
Index